Finally, Some Real Menace Enters the El Chapo Courtroom

The prosecution of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, better known as El Chapo, currently underway at the Eastern District courthouse in Brooklyn, promised to be the Scopes trial of narco-trafficking. The U.S. Attorney’s office was selling Chapo, Mexican leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, as the biggest, baddest dope-pusher in the recorded history of the trade, at least back to the commanders of British warships during the Chinese opium wars of the 1840s.

Yet as America’s first great narco trial ground through its fourth week, it was apparent that something was missing. It wasn’t the lack of information. The government’s array of cooperating witnesses (they used to be called rats) have produced reams of testimony on Chapo’s Amazon Prime—like ability to flood the market with an unprecedented volume of addictive drugs. Chapter and verse was presented on the drug lord’s bribes to corrupt Mexican officials, including alleged payouts to two former presidents. Spates of killings were described, some in graphic detail. Still, the process was a drama without a center.

Part of the problem was the U.S. Attorney’s choice to try El Chapo as a traditional drug “kingpin,” as if moving the man they call “Shorty” off the board was going to somehow end the cartels and justify the untold billions the government has spent on the War on Drugs. It was a misconception of both time and scale. When Frank Lucas, the so-called “American Gangster,” was riding high in the early 1970s, his area of control consisted of a couple of blocks along 116th Street in Harlem. The territory wasn’t vast, but Lucas was the “kingpin” of it, just as other old-school dope-pushers like Nicky Barnes and Pappy Mason were the bosses of their slivers of sidewalk. Narcoland is another realm. It is a worldwide canvas, a realm where drugs are the ultimate globalized commodity, a decentralized zone where the nation-state and the cartel are often one in the same. It is a system that transcends its players. No one mortal man could be its “kingpin.”

This isn’t to say that El Chapo shouldn’t be on trial, or be sent to the Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado. The evidence was fairly clear on that. He’d been responsible, out of sheer machismo and greed, for the horrific cartel wars in both Tijuana and Juarez, turning both Mexican border towns (with a total population of 2.6 million) into terrains of fear and despair. He’d amassed an estimated $14 billion without ever paying an unlaundered cent to either the Mexican or American governments. In his numerous depictions in the popular culture, both in Netflix series and who knew how many Mexican telenovelashe was a ruthless kill-or-be-killed figure. The trouble for watchers of the first great American narco trial was that Chapo’s alleged immorality, his vicious disregard for the best of the human spirit, was not manifested in the Brooklyn courtroom.

It could have been the fact that the drug lord was being kept in lockup 23 hours a day, or whatever meds they had him on, or his lack of physical stature, but Chapo simply didn’t look all that scary sitting day after day at the table for the defense. He certainly didn’t appear to be the fearsome legend whose penchant for uncanny escape had caused the city to shut down the Brooklyn Bridge just to transport him across the East River. Possibly because of these overhyped exploits, in person, the Culiacán gangster seemed little more than a burnt 61-year-old shell of his former hell-raising self. You could see it his eyes — the resignation, the sense of defeat. Sitting at the defense table, the drug lord’s famous black-eyed Roberto Durán stare had dissolved to abject neediness as he stole glances at his faithful young wife, Emma Coronel Aispuro, sitting in the second row of the gallery.

In short, he brought no menace to the room. And if there was one thing any decent drug prosecution needed, it was a palpable sense of living, breathing malevolence — what most recognize as sheer evil.

The calculus would reconfigure with appearance of Juan Carlos Ramírez Abadía, the 55-year old Colombian-born narco known as El Chupeta.

A federal prisoner since 2008, El Chupeta — his nickname means “Lollipop” — first met El Chapo in a Mexico City hotel lobby during 1993. He was a major coke importer looking for someone capable of moving large quantities of product into the U.S. quickly, with the least amount of drama. Chapo, then known as El Rapido owing to his high-volume, high-efficiency business model, was Ramirez’s man. It was one of most lucrative dope-distribution deals in history, raking in billions in yearly profits. But this history was the least of what El Chupeta brought to the current case.

It was the face that you noticed first, the result of four separate rounds of plastic surgery the former leader of Columbia’s Norte del Valle Cartel underwent while on the run in Brazil during the late 1990s. “I had changes done,” Chupeta said as he sat in the witness chair wearing a shiny black ski jacket with the collar rolled up, fleece gloves on his hands. “I altered the physical appearance of my jawbone, my cheekbones, my eyes, my mouth, my ears, and my nose.” If Jocelyn Wildenstein, the famous Catwoman of tabloid sensation, undertook rigorous elective facial surgery to bring out her feline nature, El Chupeta went for something darker. He’d transformed himself into Nosferatu.

The surgeries were the end product of years of peripatetic escapes on El Chupeta’s part. After years of success, the trafficker disappeared from Colombia when the government put a $5 million bounty on his head. He moved to the wild borderlands ofthen-Chavezista Venezuela. In addition to wrecking the petro economy, the leftist Venezuelan caudillo had tweaked the tail of American power by banishing the DEA, which made the country a narco paradise. During that time, El Chupeta allegedly entered into a dope-smuggling partnership with the FARC, or the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the agrarian Marxist-Leninist group of brutalists seeking to overthrow the government of his home country. But then someone tried to collect the $5 million reward, and Ramirez was on the move again, relocating to Brazil, where he lived as a reclusive king, with thousands of bottles of wine in his cellar, a multimillion-dollar art collection, and personal zoo stocked with a lion, monkeys swinging from trees, and a flock of peacocks.

The government’s direct examination of El Chupeta had its highlights, notably his spooky Conradian tale of a shipment lost at sea. Speaking in his harsh, electronic-inflected voice, El Chupeta spoke of a ship captain who had dipped too deeply into his cargo. The man went crazy, the witness said. “He started to see ghosts. He though the American Coast Guard was everywhere,” and deliberately sank the boat along with 20,000 kilos of coke. Anxious to check on the fate of his product, El Chupeta requisitioned a helicopter owned by friendly elements of the Mexican federal police. He cared nothing for the ship, or the men that had gone down with it, only the cocaine. But he saw “nothing, only the sea. When I saw all that sea I became very sad.”

A richer picture of the demon within El Chupeta came to light during the defense cross-examination this past Tuesday morning. The defense doesn’t have all that much to work with. No one thinks they’re going to get El Chapo off. Their only hope is to beat the first count against their client, the continuing criminal enterprise RICO charge that will send Chapo to jail for life (until of course he flips on whomever else the government tries next). The best tactic is to make the cooperating witnesses look even worse than their fatally compromised client.

The cross-examination was handled by William Purpura, who at 66 is the senior member of El Chapo’s estimated $5 million defense team that also includes Jeffrey Lichtman and A. Eduardo Balarezo, former counsel to Arturo Beltrán Leyva, a former Chapo cartel ally turned enemy. Previously, Purpura’s crosses had been a mixed bag. He was a shine-headed pit bull of the team, always on the attack, sometimes excessively so. But with El Chupeta, the man that trial wags joked spent his off-hours wrapped in leathery wings upside down in his cell like a bat, the Jersey-born Purpura found the proper tone.

When you’ve got the devil on the stand, you’re not going to outsmart him. The best thing you can do is keep him talking, listen closely, study the methodology. This Purpura did. He asked about the people Chupeta had ordered dead, including the one he shot in face at point-blank range. Was this all true? “Correcto!” El Chupeta answered, over and over, with the defiance of the wholly unashamed.

Purpura moved to one of the trial’s outstanding bits of evidence, El Chupeta’s ledger, his accounts of seemingly every transaction the narco engaged in over his mendacious career. There was an OCD compulsion about the account’s accuracy. Purpura asked El Chupeta how much he paid to assassinate a particular group of enemies; he knew the more than 20-year-old figure from memory, down to the last dollar: $338,776.

Later Purpura asked El Chupeta about his nickname, “Lollipop,” a sardonic reference to a poison candy to be sucked on at your own risk. Like a wiseacre street guy, Purpura asked, “You mean like a pacifier?”

It was a diss, an open challenge to which El Chupeta reacted in an unexpected way. He smiled, his lips spreading over his pointed chin, lifting the angle of his tubular cheek bones. For an instant it appeared that the Lollipop’s face might break wide open, revealing whatever darkness lurked beneath. Then a kind of guttural noise came forth, something of delighted giggle. It was a moment of victory for a street lawyer pleading his sure loser of a case. He’d made the devil laugh.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his all for all. I have long agreed with his speeches and writings. Today I think of this MLK quote, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” May we renew ourselves in his teachings so that he can RIP.

Mexico suffered a record 33,341 homicides in 2018, according to official statistics released Monday, breaking the record set in 2017, as violence fueled by a war on the country’s powerful drug cartels plagues the country.

More than 200,000 people have been murdered in Mexico since the government controversially deployed the army to fight drug trafficking in 2006. The previous record was 28,866 homicides in 2017.

Team Trump reached out to the Special Counsel’s office after BuzzFeed News’ bombshell article last week

A source familiar with the matter tells @HallieJackson that on Friday morning, after the disputed BuzzFeed article dropped, the president’s legal team “raised concerns” in a letter to Mueller’s office. This was prior to the special counsel issuing its rare rebuke Friday evening.

During the summer of 2017, when temperatures reached triple digits in Arizona, four women drove to a vast desert wilderness along the southwestern border with Mexico. They brought water jugs and canned food — items they later said they were leaving for dehydrated migrants crossing the unfriendly terrain to get to the United States.

The women were later charged with misdemeanor crimes. Prosecutors said they violated federal law by entering Cabeza Prieta, a protected 860,000-acre refuge, without a permit and leaving water and food there. A judge convicted them on Friday in the latest example of growing tension between aid workers and the U.S. Border Patrol.

The Russian pop star at the middle of the infamous 2016 Trump Tower meeting has cancelled his U.S. tour

Emin Agalarov, the Russian pop star who is said to have helped arrange Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Kremlin-linked Russian lawyer at Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign, said Monday he has been forced to cancel his tour of the United States and Canada “due to circumstances beyond [his] control.”

In a video on Facebook, Agalarov claimed he had nixed the upcoming tour “against his will.” His lawyer said in a telephone interview with NBC News that he doesn’t want his client coming to America under fear of being held under a material witness warrant. Agalarov had been scheduled to perform in New York on Saturday night.

If the Covington Catholic incident was a test, it’s one I failed—along with most others. Will we learn from it, or will we continue to roam social media, looking for the next outrage fix? Next time a story like this surfaces, I’ll try to sit it out until more facts have emerged. I’ll remind myself that the truth is sometimes unknowable, and I’ll stick to discussing the news with people I know in real life, instead of with strangers whom I’ve never met. I’ll get my news from legitimate journalists instead of from an online mob for whom Saturday-morning indignation is just another form of entertainment. And above all, I’ll try to take the advice I give my kids daily: Put the phone down and go do something productive.

President Donald Trump’s social media accounts are filled with vile racism, idiotic xenophobia, and inaccurate statistics. And now we can add another category to the list: fake photos.

In recent months, Trump’s official Facebook and Instagram accounts have published photos of the president that have been manipulated to make him look thinner. If it only happened once you might be able to chalk it up as an accident. But Gizmodo has discovered at least three different retouched photos on President Trump’s social media pages that have been published since October of 2018.

The number of U.S. airport screeners who took unscheduled absences rose to 10 percent on Sunday, more than triple that of a year ago as the stalemate over the government shutdown continued over a holiday weekend, according to the Transportation Security Administration.

The number of unscheduled TSA absences hit the highest level seen so far, the TSA said in a statement Monday as the shutdown entered its 31st day. A year ago the absence rate was 3.1 percent.

Chris Christie goes after the “riffraff” in the Trump administration in a new excerpt from his memoir — Let Me Finish

Instead of high-quality, vetted appointees for key administration posts, he got the Russian lackey and future federal felon Michael Flynn as national security adviser. He got the greedy and inexperienced Scott Pruitt as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

He got the high-flying Tom Price as health and human services secretary. He got the not-ready-for-prime-time Jeff Sessions as attorney general, promptly recusing himself from the Justice Department’s Russian-collusion probe. He got a stranger named Rex Tillerson as secretary of state. …

He got the Apprentice show loser Omarosa Manigault in whatever Omarosa’s job purported to be. (I never could figure that one out.) … Too few Kellyanne Conways. A boatload of Sebastian Gorkas. Too few Steven Mnuchins.

Bloomberg speech at @NationalAction DC breakfast a concerted effort to prove his life has focused on issues important African-American community, touching on education, environmental justice, lessons from father, and - above all - gun violence

Oxfam said the wealth of more than 2,200 billionaires across the globe had increased by $900bn in 2018 – or $2.5bn a day. The 12% increase in the wealth of the very richest contrasted with a fall of 11% in the wealth of the poorest half of the world’s population.

As a result, the report concluded, the number of billionaires owning as much wealth as half the world’s population fell from 43 in 2017 to 26 last year. In 2016 the number was 61.

Senator Kamala Harris, the California Democrat and barrier-breaking prosecutor who became the second black woman to serve in the United States Senate, declared her candidacy for president on Monday, joining an increasingly crowded and diverse field in what promises to be a wide-open nomination process.

The announcement was bathed in symbolism: Ms. Harris chose to enter the race on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, an overt nod to the historic nature of her candidacy, and her timing was also meant to evoke Shirley Chisholm, the New York congresswoman who became the first woman to seek the Democratic Party’s nomination for president 47 years ago this week.

More details and context regarding Friday’s confrontation between a Native American drummer and Catholic school teens in D.C.

Nathan Phillips said in an interview with The Associated Press that he was trying to keep peace between some Kentucky high school students and a black religious group that was also on the National Mall on Friday. The students were participating in the March for Life, which drew thousands of anti-abortion protesters, and Phillips was attending the Indigenous Peoples March happening the same day.

“Something caused me to put myself between (them) — it was black and white,” said Phillips, who lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan. “What I saw was my country being torn apart. I couldn’t stand by and let that happen.”

Videos show a youth standing very close to Phillips and staring at him as he sang and played the drum. Other students — some in “Make America Great Again” hats and sweatshirts — were chanting, laughing and jeering. Other videos also showed members of the religious group, who appear to be affiliated with the Black Hebrew Israelite movement, yelling disparaging and profane insults at the students, who taunt them in return. Video also shows the Native Americans being insulted by the small religious group as well. …

In a joint statement , the Roman Catholic Diocese of Covington and Covington Catholic High School apologized and said they are investigating and will take “appropriate action, up to and including expulsion. … We extend our deepest apologies to Mr. Phillips … This behavior is opposed to the Church’s teachings on the dignity and respect of the human person.”

Sign of the times, 30 days into the longest government shutdown in American history

GoFundMe starts its own effort to assist federal workers hit by the shutdown. Employees of world’s most powerful nation “are being forced to work without pay and line up at diaper or food banks,” said GoFundMe CEO Rob Solomon. “It makes no sense.” https://t.co/aQDYv0EmwZ

Cohen’s lie about the timeline of a project regarding a big skyscraper with Trump’s name on it didn’t catch Donald Trump’s attention, according to Giuliani

Mr. Giuliani said that when Mr. Cohen testified to Congress that the project had ended in January 2016, Mr. Trump simply “accepted” that answer.

“The president couldn’t tell you the exact day it started and the exact day it ended; he remembers it started and he remembers it ended,” Mr. Giuliani said, but nothing more. “It never got to anything concrete.”

“We’re being told to stand our ground. Our reporting is going to be borne out to be accurate, and we’re 100% behind it,” [Cormier explained to host Brian Stelter]. … [The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist], who wouldn’t reveal his sources when asked, said the story had been in the works for months and went through a “rigorous” vetting process. The story was reviewed by at least three editors, Smith said. …

Smith said BuzzFeed is “eager” to understand which parts of the report Mueller’s office is challenging as inaccurate. He said BuzzFeed reporter Jason Leopold, who coauthored the story, submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for details on how the statement from Mueller’s office was constructed. …

Journalist Carl Bernstein, a CNN political analyst, told Stelter on Sunday that he thought it was “going to take time before we fully understand what the exact truth is here.”

An intentionally misrepresented solution to an intentionally misrepresented crisis

A Republican senator who encouraged President Donald Trump to pursue a compromise with congressional Democrats to end the partial government shutdown described the White House’s offer this weekend as “a straw man proposal” that is not intended to become law.

“What I encouraged the White House to do and multiple others encouraged the White House to do is put out a proposal,” Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) said Sunday during an interview with host Martha Raddatz on ABC’s “This Week.”

“They’ve listened to a lot of Democrat and Republican members for the last month. They’ve heard all the demands, they know all the background on it,” said Lankford, a member of the Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

“Put out a straw man proposal. Get something out there the president can say, ‘I can support this’ — and has elements from both sides. Put it on the table, then open it up for debate.”

Rudy Giuliani was “defending” the president on the Sunday morning shows again this week, and it’s gone about as well as you’d expect.

On CNN”s State of the Union, Giuliani said, “As far as I know, President Trump did not have discussions with [Michael Cohen about his Congressional testimony] — Certainly no discussions with him in which he told him or counseled him to lie.” But he also acknowledged, “I don’t know if it happened or it didn’t happen… I have no knowledge if he spoke to him,” before adding, “And so what if he talked to him about it?”

“If he had any discussions with him, they’d be about the version of the events that Michael Cohen gave them which they all believe was true,” Giuliani also explained, and angrily accused host Jake Tapper of having “hysteria” after Tapper said he wanted to learn the truth about the Cohen-Trump interactions. “You should all be careful,” Giuliani said.

On Meet the Press, Giuliani was “100 percent certain” that Trump did not ask Cohen to lie.

“I can tell you his counsel to Michael Cohen throughout that entire period was, ‘Tell the truth,’ he added. “We thought he was telling the truth. I still believe he may have been telling the truth when he testified before Congress,”

Giuliani also admitted on MTP that Trump’s discussions about building a Trump Tower in Moscow went on “throughout 2016”, and possibly even into November — even though Trump said then and later that he had no business with Russia.

“It’s our understanding that [the Trump Tower Moscow talks] went on throughout 2016, not a lot of them, but there were conversations, can’t be sure of the exact date. … Probably up to — could be up to as far as October, November.”

1) Threatened to hunt down and deport DACA recipients if Democrats don’t accept his offer to temporarily cancel his cancellation of DACA, while also assuring the (pissed-off) far right that the deal doesn’t include amnesty, while also suggesting full amnesty would be an option sometime later, if he gets what he wants.

2) Used the severe winter weather striking much of the U.S. to make fun of climate change (which is causing more severe weather, year-round).

4) Made another effort to dominate Pelosi in response to her cancellation of his State of the Union speech, insisting he has “so many options” which include “doing it as per your written offer (made during the Shutdown, security is no problem), and my written acceptance,” whatever that is supposed to mean.